This article was first published in Computing in Science & Engineering*.
ANARI* is a new 3D rendering API, an emerging Khronos* standard that enables visualization applications to take advantage of state-of-the-art rendering techniques across diverse hardware platforms and rendering engines. Visualization applications have historically embedded custom-written renderers to enable them to provide the necessary combination of features, performance, and visual fidelity required by their users. As computing power, rendering algorithms, dedicated rendering hardware acceleration operations, and associated low-level APIs have advanced, the effort and costs associated with maintaining renderers within visualization applications have risen dramatically. The rising cost and complexity associated with renderer development creates an undesirable barrier for visualization applications to be able to fully benefit from the latest rendering methods and hardware. ANARI directly addresses these challenges by providing a high-level, visualization-oriented API that abstracts low-level rendering algorithms and hardware acceleration details while providing easy and efficient access to diverse ANARI implementations, thereby enabling visualization applications to support state-of-the-art rendering capabilities.
